As many of you know, I’m a very mild mannered person – very, very few people will have ever seen me get angry. But sometimes dodgy PR does just that – forget road rage, I get research rage! The latest was triggered from an article that starts: “Britain is a country full of niche shops [...]

I’m attending Finovate Spring in San Francisco (Finovate.com). We’ve seen a number of great demos, and others that haven’t gone so well.  If you think of a classic consultant’s 2×2, with one dimension being strength of the idea and the other the strength of the presenter, probably the most unfortunate quadrant is the one that [...]

My last post mentioned that I was on a panel at International Payments Summit talking about real time payments. The topic is one that has cropped up many times recently in analyst inquiry calls in the last few months. With all the activity in the market, such as the decision in Australia to implement such [...]

I spoke recently during the mobile track at the annual NetFinance conference in Arizona.  My slot at the end of the first day meant that by the time my turn rolled around, I was faced with good news and bad news.  It was good that there was so much agreement among all the participants, and [...]

I presented at the CARTES America conference in Las Vegas last week. It was a great event with many interesting conference sessions and good opportunities to network. One of the highlights for me was the opening keynote with panelists representing various merchant organisations, such as Merchant Advisory Group (MRA), National Restaurant Asociation (NRA) and The Association for Convenience and [...]

Last Tuesday, 23 April, a hacked Twitter message from the Associated Press about an attack on the White House that injured President Barack Obama, turned out to be bogus. But the tweet sparked a brief 145 point market selloff that dramatized the power of algorithmic trading – sophisticated computer software that analyzes language using algorithms [...]

I was at International Payments Summit in London last week. I spoke on a panel on real time payments, the insights of which will be the basis of a later blog.  But here are the highlights for me: IPS may well be back I last attended IPS 5 or 6 years ago. I stopped going [...]

Earlier this week, RBS launched a mobile chat feature, available to its business mobile banking users.  RBS isn’t the only one jumping onto the mobile chat bandwagon – San Diego County Credit Union announced a similar offering . The concept is pretty straightforward, and is similar to the online chat tools that some banks have incorporated [...]

When Visa restructured in 2007-2008, Visa USA, Visa Canada, and Visa International were merged into the new public company. Visa Europe became a separate company owned by its member banks. An article in Wall Street Journal this week claimed that the European banks were ready to sell their stake in Visa Europe back to Visa Inc. I am not [...]

In a blog on February 5th we broke the news that there was likely to be a regulatory review of payments governance. This was as a result of a speech the chancellor had made the previous day. Whilst UK centric in topic, these changes have global implications, as more governments around the world take an [...]